The art, or, as the Continental foresters call it, the science of sylviculture has been so little pursued in England and America, that its nomenclature has not been introduced into the English vocabulary, and I shall not be able to describe its processes with technical propriety of language, without occasionally borrowing a word from the forest literature of France and Germany. A full discussion of the methods of sylviculture would, indeed, be out of place in a work like the present, but the almost total want of conveniently accessible means of information on the subject, in English-speaking countries, will justify me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than would otherwise be pertinent.
The two best known methods are those distinguished as the _taillis_, copse or coppice treatment,[294] and the _futaie_, for which I find no English equivalent, but which may not inappropriately be called the _full-growth_ system. A _taillis_, copse, or coppice, is a wood composed of shoots from the roots of trees previously cut for fuel and timber. The shoots are thinned out from time to time, and finally cut, either after a fixed number of years, or after the young trees have attained to certain dimensions, their roots being then left to send out a new progeny as before. This is the cheapest method of management, and therefore the best wherever the price of labor and of capital bears a high proportion to that of land and of timber; but it is essentially a wasteful economy. If the woodland is, in the first place, completely cut over, as is found most convenient in practice, the young shoots have neither the shade nor the protection from wind so important to forest growth, and their progress is comparatively slow, while, at the same time, the thick clumps they form choke the seedlings that may have sprouted near them. If domestic animals of any species are allowed to roam in the wood, they browse upon the terminal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if they do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all beauty and vigor of growth. The evergreens, once cut, do not shoot up again,[295] and the mixed character of the forest--in many respects an important advantage, if not an indispensable condition of growth--is lost;[296] and besides this, large wood of any species cannot be grown in this method, because trees which shoot from decaying stumps and their dying roots, become hollow or otherwise unsound before they acquire their full dimensions. A more fatal objection still, is, that the roots of trees will not bear more than two or three, or at most four cuttings of their shoots before their vitality is exhausted, and the wood can then be restored only by replanting entirely. The period of cutting coppices varies in Europe from fifteen to forty years, according to soil, species, and rapidity of growth.